Along the River during the Qingming Festival - Chinese Treasure, Traditional Chinese Painting in Hand Scroll Format
Along the River during the Qingming Festival, ink and pigment on silk, is 0.252 meter wide and 5.287 meters long. It is a genre painting of Northern Song dynasty and the only reserved masterpiece by Zhang Zeduan. It is a national cultural relic which is collected by the Palace Museum.
The entire piece was painted in hand scroll format and the content reveals the customs and activities of the Qingming Festival in Bianliang, today's Kaifeng, and along Bian River in Northern Song dynasty. The content of the painting can be divided into three parts. Some of the human images (depicted) are less than one inch and some are even merely as big as a soya bean. But all of these are extremely vividly painted.
The painting depicts a large scale and various scenes from the urban field along the Bian River to the downtown street. The painter skillfully uses the bird’s-eye view of composition to combine all the grand and complicated scenes in the picture of less than twenty feet long and one foot high. According to the statistics, there are more than 550 human images, about 60 livestock, more than 20 different vehicles, more than 20 boats, and more than 30 buildings. No matter painting human images or other objects, every stroke was carefully laid on the picture to compose the accurate and vivid images. This fully demonstrates the painter’s talent in summarizing daily life and refining the material as well as his superb skills in painting.
Along the River during the Qingming Festival not only occupies an important position in the history of Chinese art, but also has a high value in the study of history as it thoroughly and carefully depicts the customs, bridges and buildings, road situation and transportation as well as human relations at that time. It becomes an extremely valuable image data in the study of all kinds of social life in China’s Song Dynasty.
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